Resident Evil 4 Make new is only a few weeks away, and while many players will be buying the game digitally, most hardcore fans have likely reserved their $250 collector’s editions, which come complete with a statue of Leon holding a shotgun and tired as hell looks. However, the Collector’s Editions were exclusive to GameStop, and on Tuesday the company announced that all in-store pre-orders had been cancelled. Now the employees are just as weary as Leon at the prospect of having to call their most loyal customers and break the bad news.
“If you pre-ordered the Resident Evil 4 Collector’s Edition IN-STORE at GameStop – they just issued a memo stating the CE isn’t arriving in stores and will not be fulfilled/arriving,” pre-order king Wario64 posted on Twitter last night. “Doesn’t mention anything about online orders, so I assume online orders will not be affected.”
The message was confirmed on GameStop subreddit where employees melted over the last low-key meme public company fiasco. It’s not clear why GameStop canceled the in-store pre-orders — whether it was due to insufficient stock or backend software issues — but it doesn’t matter to fans who thought they already had the pre-orders hard-to-find collector’s editions on lock.
“One of the pre-orders is for my regulars who are huge Resident Evil fans and have been pretty muddled by the pre-orders from the SAP conversion,” an apparent contributor wrote on the subreddit. “So they hesitated for a while to pre-order anything. now this? Pooh.”
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GameStop, which is struggling with declining revenue and scaling staff even as its stock price has soared to historic highs, suffered a major inventory system failure last fall. As my city reported at the timea system-wide software conversion, completely shattered most stores’ pre-order records, leading to countless cancellations and shipping issues throughout the season.
Big blockbusters were affected NBA 2K23but it was even worse for hard copies of niche releases like The Legend of Heroes: Traces of Zero. While most gamers have moved to buying games digitally, die-hard fans and collectors still covet physical copies, particularly for more obscure games, popular indie releases, or limited collector’s editions. It’s a potential sweet spot that GameStop could serve as the only brick-and-mortar gaming chain still in existence. Instead, pre-orders are more unpredictable than ever and the consequences fall on underpaid and understaffed stores.
“We’re taking hours of cuts and now they expect us to call people who were super excited about this game – who will 100% turn their heads and be angry or extremely upset about it,” one person wrote on the GameStop subreddit. Another wrote, “It’s like ‘holy shit are they actively trying to kill the stores?’ As if they’re trying to sell pre-orders while at the same time “oh yeah, if you pre-order in store they’ll be the first to be canceled if there’s delivery issues”.
